Except the change on the look, I’d like to introduce some interesting changes internally.

1. Partial update.

By far, The most issues I have received is that MPlayerX was unable to play some file. Most of the time, such issue is not related with MPlayerX itself, but ffmpeg or mplayer which works as the player core inside of MPlayerX.

So I introduced this so called Partial Update into 1.1.0, which enable me to update the ffmpeg/mplayer part without updatig the whole app. Hopfully It could help me to update the player core to resolve your playback issues more quickly.

Last year was a tremendous year for me, my first kid was given birth ( actually I’d rather say MPX is my first child :)), work made me busier and busier, I was never happier and busier than before.

Taking a look back, the only down thing is that I didn’t have much time on making much progress on my “first child” as before, even I didn’t have much time to enjoy my best favorite movies. The only one I didn’t miss is Interstellar, which gave me 3 hours peace and enjoyment in mind.

I was hesitating once, as seeing more and more people are now spending more and more time on their iPhones and Androids, I wondered how much it is still meaningful to make progress on the desktop application. Until one day, I captured my kid by HandyCam, edited it and played it on TV, and the other day, I waited for minutes to see the video in youtube, and another day, I found I need to analyze a video frame by frame… I found mobile phone is still not that powerful and versatile to accomplish such tasks. I knew I need to continue my efforts on MPlayerX to keep the wonderful user experience that my iPhone could not.

Now I have made 50+ patches, make MPlayerX more adoptable to Yosemite, fix several bugs, upgrading the new core to support https and latest protocol of youtube. Hope I could release it before 10.11 is coming.

The other thing is that, MPlayerX will start to utilize the installer to fulfil monetization. I knew it may bring many negative comments, but honestly it is the best way to keep the developer motivated. For anyone who cares about this, please check the installer and make sure only install MPX, then it should be no difference with the old way.

As the title indicated, it is a cookbook for someone like me, who has the programming basis on OSX/iOS, and wants to take a quick look at the network programming especially.

This book explained how to program in OSX/iOS at several levels, from the lowest BSD socket layer to the highest AFNetworking library.

BSD socket library provides you the lowest level and most flexibility, however this also means you have to everything yourself. If you just want to use the latest HTTP technology, such as json, plist data transferring and analysis, there are better choices on OSX/iOS, such as AFNetworking, MKNetworkKit. These libraries are purely Objective-C, modern designed, and should be much easier to use than BSD library’s C API.

There are also several sample code shown in the book, basically a web server and client implementation is demonstrated, by utilizing each level of technology. These sample code self-explained how to implement the network programming, also help the readers to understand which technology should be their best choice.

MPlayerX supports to decode the video with Hardware Accelerated Decoder (HAD). This feature uses your modern GPU to decode video frame, so that free your CPU for other tasks, and decrease the power consumption in the meantime, hopefully.

Currently, there is no easy way to turn on/off the HAD. And ideally, this feature should be transparent to users, and HAD should be always turned on.

However, the development on HAD is still in the preliminary stage, sometimes HAD may fail to decode the frame and even cause MPlayerX’s core crash.

If you found MPlayerX failed to play some H264, MP4, MPEG2, AVC contents, please try the following instructions to turn off HAD.